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July 13, 2009

Sub-units in Dimension Styles

Another new feature in AutoCAD LT 2010 that falls into the small-but-potentially-very-significant category is the ability to use sub-units in dimension styles. This means that you can show different magnitudes of dimensions with different units.

(This is not the same thing as Alternate Units, which is designed to show two different families of measurement at the same time, i.e. inches and millimeters. More on those another time.)

For example, check out these two walls, currently dimensioned in meters.

But let's say I want to show the shorter wall in centimeters instead. In the Dimension Style Manager, under the Primary Units tab, there's an option to suppress leading zeros.

Check the box, and the Sub-units options become available. Now, I can enter a sub-units factor of 100 (the conversion factor between meters and centimeters) and a suffix of "cm" (with or without a space). This helps to distinguish between the regular dimensions and sub-unit ones.

When I close out of the Dimension Style Manager and go back to the drawing, the shorter wall now shows up as 45.72 cm instead of 0.46 like it did before.